This iPad accessory is about to up-end the whole 3D imaging industry
From 360 video to 3D emoji, there's a big movement from Microsoft and others to make 3D imagery accessible to everyone. However, the act of scanning a real-word environment — a room and everything in it, for example — remains an expensive chore, involving hours of manual measurements and subsequent building in 3D software.
That will no longer be the case if the Structure Sensor has anything to say about it. Introduced by Occipital two years ago as a way to quickly scan objects and spaces and turn them into 3D imagery, the $379 gadget is getting an upgrade. With a new app called Canvas, the scanner can scan a room in incredible detail, letting users measure things like the length of furniture and the distance from floor to ceiling. Typical time for capturing a room scan: less than a minute.
Importantly, Canvas isn't just an app; it's a cloud-based service where users can upload and share access to their scans.
"With Canvas, we're trying to build a real end-to-end application," says Jeff Powers, CEO of Occipital. "This is not demo ware. Canvas is a product that we wanted to see exist on top of 3D sensing, so we built it."
Quick refresher on the Structure Sensor: It's an oblong-shaped device, roughly the length of a pen, that's loaded with sensors for capturing objects for 3D imagery. It's meant to attach the back of an iPad, but it can be used with smartphones, too. Occipital conceived the Structure Sensor as a means to create 3D scans that were a step up from what you could get via a regular smartphone camera. It launched on Kickstarter, and surpassed its $100,000 goal by over 10x.
While the Sensor is excellent at scanning objects, it was sometimes challenged to accurately capture a 3D space. The scans were "coarse" and couldn't correct for errors on the fly. With the launch of Canvas, Occipital is fixing that — Structure Sensor now comes with a screw-on lens for your iPad camera (it uses both its own cameras and the device's) that improves room capture.
There's more — a lot more, if you're a looking to do detailed work with your 3D creations. The biggest feature of the Canvas app is "Scan to CAD," which does exactly what it says. Pressing the button will send your raw, scale-accurate scan to Occipital's new cloud service, which will transform it into a clean CAD drawing, complete with labeling, with objects (like furniture) removed.
The bad news: Scan to CAD costs $29 per scan, and it takes up to 48 hours to get the CAD files. Still, professionals such as contractors will likely think that's a hell of a deal, since building a CAD drawing from scratch takes a ton of costly manual work, whereas with the Structure Sensor, all you need to do is point your iPad at a space, press a button and wait.
"Most remodeling projects — you're looking at seven hours of measurement time, and it's even more time to take those measurements and build a model," says Alex Schiff, Occipital product manager. "Whereas with Canvas, you take the scan, you upload it, and two days later you have something that's ready to design. So we're saving easily $1,000 per project and hours and hours of people's time."
Occipital's new app is potentially a big step forward in cost and convenience for a lot of users. Assuming it finds a big demand for its Scan to CAD feature, the startup might have trouble scaling, since it's a human-assisted service.
"The two ways to scale is to train more humans to help out, and continue to make the software more powerful so they have to spend less time per scan," Powers says.
"We hope it's a problem we hit."
Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
